Pat Barker is renowned for her Regeneration Trilogy, the series set in and around the first world war in which the focus is very much on men, military and memory (she returns to this arena in her latest, Life Class). However, her first trilogy, about the drudge of being a working-class woman in the post-industrial landscape of the north east, is often overlooked. Barker's publishing history, and success, can tell us more about contemporary society than we think.

Even with kind words and encouragement from the late Angela Carter, it took Pat Barker 10 years to find a publisher for Union Street. Virago finally brought it out in 1982, and followed it with her second two novels, Blow Your House Down (1984) and Liza's England (1986). But it was not until she moved away from Virago (as in "brave, courageous woman") to the aptly named Viking, ("war-loving-hyper-masculinity"), that she became a household name. This is despite the fact that most novel readers, and especially of women authors, are women.

Barker's career trajectory can tell us much about writing by women that is deemed "gritty", not just by the reviewers but also the reading public. Even though many feel Regeneration Trilogy confronts difficult and challenging themes, I would argue that her first three novels are much grittier in their relentless despair. They also shatter the myth that there existed a recognisable "sisterhood" amongst the women, that saw them "stick together" through thick and thin; a myth that many feminists would like to believe.

Take Union Street. It is a series of interconnected short stories each featuring a woman from the street, from the youngest, Kelly, to the oldest, Alice. When Kelly is raped, Barker is able to show us through her reactions the resentment she feels at her "lot" in life. She breaks into the house of a well-to-do suburban family and is bemused by the bedroom of the middle-class girl with its pink quilts and pony paraphernalia proudly displayed. It is alien territory from the two-up two-downs and damp of Union Street. The last story focuses on the poverty-stricken life of the oldest woman on the street, but this is not some Catherine Cookson type "pulling self up by bootstraps" story. None of them are. They are gritty (a word often overused when it comes to novels by and about working-class women), but it is not a cheap grit, rather one that has been ground out, grain by grain, in order to give a realistic picture of life as it was - and remains today for many in forgotten pockets up and down the country.

The second novel, Blow Your House Down, calls to mind the murders of Ipswich sex workers last year. Inspired by the reign of the Yorkshire Ripper, it raised a theme that would later rear its head in the media coverage of the Ipswich murders - how the serial killer is often mythologised with a label, whereas the women are just "prostitutes". Despite its black humour, it is a deeply political book.

The third, Liza's England, in many ways the most moving of the trilogy, tracks the life of a northern working-class woman from the beginning of the century to well into Thatcher's reign, exploding feminist myths as readily as political ones. Barker's women do not want equality with men - their men are just as powerless as they are, seeking solace only in drinking, fighting and fucking.

These novels should be read by those who have not yet encountered them, and re-read by those who have. Why? Because to do so requires us to take an unflinching look at the lives that many in this country still live. And, unlike those novels written by the working-class men of the 1950s and 60s (John Braine's Room at the Top, David Storey's This Sporting Life, Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night, Sunday Morning) it puts working-class women at the centre of the drama.